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Brett’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Brett’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Brett Hetherington’s Followers (10)
651 books
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38 friends
413 books
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221 friends
305 books
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16 friends
530 books
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18 friends
1,743 books
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23 friends
2,798 books
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1,082 friends
319 books
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1,642 friends
2,717 books
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2,615 friends
More friends…
Brett Hetherington
Goodreads Author
Born
in Canberra, Australia
Website
Twitter
Genre
Influences
George Orwell, Paul Theroux, Isabel Fonseca, James Baldwin, Doris Less
...more
Member Since
January 2014
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Brett Hetherington
questions,
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
New post and Last post: Please join me now over on my new Substack page
I'm afraid it's goodbye.
But thanks for the memories...and thanks for reading!
After 14 years here and 832 posts, and my intro to online posting, it's all over because I've found someone new to share my life with! Well, you know what I mean...
Please join me now over on my new Substack page: https://bretthetherington.substack.com/
All my old blogposts are there so for nostalgia's sake we are not reall
Read more of this blog post »
Brett’s Recent Updates
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Brett Hetherington
liked
a
quote
“I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.”
Marguerite Duras |
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Brett Hetherington
liked
a
quote
“An organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life.”
Peter Wohlleben |
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Brett Hetherington
wants to read
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Brett Hetherington
and
14 other people
liked
Theo Logos's review
of
American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders:
"Richard Grant is a Brit with an inclination to ramble. After falling in love with the wide-open spaces and endless road of the American West he rearranged his life to travel it at will. When he’d run out of money, he’d returned to England and sell ar"
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Brett Hetherington
and
14 other people
liked
Chris Steeden's review
of
Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads:
"‘Dromomania: an abnormal, obsessive desire to roam. Drapetomania: an uncontrollable desire to wander away from home.’
Grant has wandered away from home. From the confines of an East London, England dwelling under a concrete grey sky to the vast big sk" Read more of this review » |
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Brett Hetherington
rated a book it was amazing
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Unique. I've never read anything quite as singular in a series of connected real-life anecdotes. Rory MacLean must be one of the most underrated writers of nonfiction in the UK. A masterpiece of dark comedy, this rolling tale also gives the reader de ...more |
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Brett Hetherington
liked
a
quote
“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
Leo Tolstoy |
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Brett Hetherington
rated a book it was amazing
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My own young imagination, before I could even read, had been fired by this book. With its superbly memorable illustrations by Garth Williams. I would always ask my mother to read me this story and one scene in particular is imprinted on my memory eve ...more |
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"Reading this book, I got reminded by the simple yet complex fragments in Olga Tokarczuk’s most celebrated work, Flights. In her novel, Olga Tokarczuk attempts to provide a constellation of different angles and timelines which shift continuously throu"
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Brett Hetherington
wants to read
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“Later that night, I passed through a public garden [in Córdoba] that was
displaying hundreds of small multi-coloured flags. They were part
of a protest against the Israeli government’s military action in
Gaza and were accompanied by a prominent list of the names of
those who had been killed. I was heartened to see that in a
provincial city like this one there were people who were well aware
of events a long way outside their own area. The continuing existence of this display in a public place was an example of local
government tolerance towards left-wing causes, and I wondered if
the same attitude would be shown by the town hall in conservative
Madrid, 400 kilometres away.”
―
displaying hundreds of small multi-coloured flags. They were part
of a protest against the Israeli government’s military action in
Gaza and were accompanied by a prominent list of the names of
those who had been killed. I was heartened to see that in a
provincial city like this one there were people who were well aware
of events a long way outside their own area. The continuing existence of this display in a public place was an example of local
government tolerance towards left-wing causes, and I wondered if
the same attitude would be shown by the town hall in conservative
Madrid, 400 kilometres away.”
―
“I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region.
They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country.
If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”
― Slow Travels in Unsung Spain
They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country.
If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”
― Slow Travels in Unsung Spain
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― Richard II
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― Richard II
“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
― Homage to Catalonia
― Homage to Catalonia
“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!--so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.”
― The Rings of Saturn
― The Rings of Saturn
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